Lord Ratner

Not usually. I do the same. Easy peasy

You can be stupid and right at the same time. While we generally agree on a lot, reading your posts feels like chewing on tin foil. They are inane enough to make some smart part of my brain wish we didn't agree.

That could be the title of every chapter of this pandemic.

Wealthfront is simple and great. I use them for our emergency cash supply.

You can't remove them, even amongst a seemingly small subgroup. They have and always will form. Bad ones can form, but the solution is not to get rid of it entirely. Doing so just means you aren't influencing the hierarchy that forms as the replacement. This is a huge reason why liberal policies fail so hard, so often. The hierarchy itself *is* the enemy, that which offends the liberal conscious (because they are not fair, and often exceedingly unfair). So why on earth would you replace a bad thing with another bad thing? Jordan Peterson talks about this often. The trick is to create a wide range of numerous hierarchies that allow for more people to find one they can excel in. This Chicago thing is about predators. They aren't caused by the hierarchy, so removing ranks won't fix it. Though it can give the appearance of "doing something," which quite often allows the real problem to persist.

When I was at the academy in 03-07 you could get a CD at 7%.

I'm always puzzled when people blame the construct for the behavior. Rank is just a reflection of hierarchies, which are inseparable from humanity. You get rid of cadet ranks and they will be replaced by another construct, which will act the same way. You have to structure the hierarchies in a way that promote stability. But acting as though they can be removed from the equation is like arguing that we should just remove hate, or fear, or greed. They are foundational components of humanity. The failure was not the existence of rank. It never is.

Be careful with long bonds. The entire market is pricing in the defeat of inflation by early 2024. If the narrative shifts to entrenched inflation (got a little taste of that fear today), all bets are off with bonds. Tbills, however, are a fantastic deal right now

Exactly. Prior to the internet. Laws became necessary with each technological revolution. Fortunately with the internet we acted with great discretion to see what the new technology would become, and now almost 30 years later, I think we know enough to decide what is and isn't ok. It's easy to just stick your fingers in your ears and call on "personal responsibility," but do we really expect 13 year old girls to just be responsible and not consume content that makes them suicidal? But Seth, what about the parents!? That's their job!! Well what about kids with no parents? Or shitty parents? We just doom them to the predations of corporate sociopaths who will do anything to sell more ads? We need laws that protect children because we have decided as a society that they can't protect themselves. Adults don't need the same protection, but they do need to know the rules of the game, and that the game is fair. Expecting everyone to read dozens of EULAs and consent to selling their personal data to advertising giants to use software that is expected by most professions now is a broken concept. I do not trust the government, like many here. But I think people are forgetting *why* it's bad to trust government. Too much power in the hands of too few people tends to create tyrants who act to enrich themselves and lock out competition to their thrones. The tech "oligarchs," as this thread is titled, seem to fit that description a little too well these days, and I don't trust them either.

They are going to burn the furniture now that it's finally starting to come apart from the decades of abuse. Just wait, when the economy rolls over into a recession, they will howl for the Fed to start printing money again. Then we're really going to see some shit...

No clue, I've been out for 5 years already.

Okay I think I see where I'm missing the point. "Imaging IR missile" Imaging doesn't mean "visible light spectrum imaging" to me, because you can just as easily have an IR image. Imaging and IR missile. Gotcha. My B.

Don't think I said anything about AIM-anything. The physics of light transmission don't change based on the platform. "A white balloon" with zero additional heat source, as quoted, has a particular IR signature. A very, very, very mild one. Looks more like a shadow than an object, depending on the IR sources behind it. Now, the equipment attached to that balloon is a different story, and from the video of the first shoot down, it looks like it was the equipment that was targeted, not the balloon. Wonder why. Looks like the other balloon was mylar, which is yet another signature type, and much brighter than thin rubber

Not necessarily depending on what type of balloon it was. If it was a rubber birthday style balloon, then yes, it would have a different IR signature than the sky, but if it was one of the metallic balloons it would depend heavily on what type of paint was on it. Metal is an IR reflector, so if you look at a baking sheet pan through a thermal camera, it looks like you're looking at a perfect mirror, even though in the visible spectrum, you don't see a reflection. With the round surface of a metallic balloon, I suspect it would be incredibly difficult to get some sort of reliable lock on it. Depending on what angle you are coming at it from, it might be reflecting the ground, or the sky, or more likely some sort of distorted combination of both. But again, this depends on the balloon and whether or not the metallic surface was covered by paint, which emits IR predictably. I bought a flir camera a few years back and it's actually pretty neat to see the world in that spectrum. Yeah I got to see it in the military from one of the cameras on the plane for hours and hours and hours, but it's a lot different when you are looking at things within 100 ft versus thousands of feet away. Add to that that thin plastics and rubbers are nearly IR transparent, then even a rubber balloon would be a rather difficult target. If you look at a shower curtain through a flir camera you just see what's behind it. It does dampen the image a little bit, but not enough that I think you would have an easy time getting a lock on something made of very thin rubber from thousands of feet away. As you said, the sky is a very high contrast background (since there is very little heat being emitted from empty space), but that also assumes a clear sky

This was the inevitable end with fiat. Either the BRICS coalition creates a new currency bloc backed by gold (or anything not fiat-like) and the dollar is forced to abandon the money printing parade to survive, or the new currency bloc will act like fiat (because making money from nothing is the ultimate government dream) and thus pose no real threat to the dollar.

Well you said it: bullshit excuses. But at least in my case, I've seen maybe a couple instances of pilots going too far in 5 years. I've seen hundreds of instances of pilots leaning forward, even just considering your examples. The job is very well defined: What you do, what is and isn't allowed, and what the pilots are responsible for within the company. An example (for those not at AA). "Just one ping" means that when something is wrong/missing on the plane, the pilots make one call to the appropriate office, get acknowledgement, then wait. Maintenance call-out, missing catering, fuel increase, etc. You call once, then wait. Often in a chaotic airline like AA that call gets dropped. I can't count the number of times my captain is literally jumping out of his chair to call over and over and over to get the issue resolved. It's not our job. We are not paid to go above and beyond, not are we even encouraged to. Management takes for granted how much gets done on time because the pilots notice it, and so they must be taught. That means people will miss connections, weddings, funerals, etc. Sucks, but that's life. Our job is not a higher calling, it's just a job with a higher emphasis on safety, *not* timeliness. The military guys are usually worse. They talk the same game everyone else does, then immediately lean forward, sometimes literally while complaining about the lack of negotiating progress. It's comical, but also illustrative. We all want to git-er-done. And we are all trained to identify and avoid risk. Great traits for flying, terrible for bringing out your inner longshoreman.

There's a certain irony that the modern avatar of female empowerment is doing random things that men have been doing routinely for decades.

That's exactly why we get nowhere, unfortunately. When you pay me to do that job, I will. Until then, that family will have to deal with the repercussions of doing business with a company that can't negotiate a contract. I wish we didn't work in that world, but we do. That family is a meaningless number to the people running the airline. You take responsibility for their happiness and you are not only going to fail, but you *directly* impede the progress towards a contract. I hope that one day we will evolve beyond the private capital/shareholder obsessed/metrics-based corporatism that our system is currently stuck in. If we actually escape the government-funded stock market model we've endured over the last 30-40 years, I think we'll get back to the world where you make money only by providing a good product or service, not buying an existing one and cost-cutting into irrelevance while making the investors a quick buck. But we haven't, and for now we work for sociopathic accountants competing with each other over who can make the most while accomplishing the least. You want a contract from those people, you have to threaten what they care about. Like with many diseases, treating the symptoms (passengers being left to the predations of a shitty airline) instead of the cause (terrible management that doesn't understand human capital) can make the outcome worse for everyone.

Delta didn't stop. On the contrary, they forced as much flying into green slips as they ever have. Every pilot knows how to display their frustration. But the dirty little secret is that most aren't actually upset. That *might* change once Delta pilots are making ~20% more for the same job. Pilots are very attenuated to fairness, but that can't trigger from a hypothetical. But I still have to convince captains to just do the job as it is written in the books. Just yesterday I had a captain ask, "you're going to take a delay to get the windshield cleaned?" Yeah dude, it's night and it's dirty. Let's not even get into the fact we're in negotiations. These guys are programmed to get the "mission" done. It's in their DNA. Fighting for better compensation is not.

I'm guessing it'll be a bit more like this...

Yes! These are the two examples I always use. Bundy shows a bloodless use of the 2A. Waco shows a bloody use. Yeah, those people died, but because of their guns they forced the government to draw blood for what they wanted, and that price turned out to be too high, leading to changes in how the govt performs raids. The 2A is about increasing the cost of tyranny, not just allowing for a popular revolt.

Lol, the war on parents is the best thing that ever happened to the Republican party.

I gotta say I think I'm with gearhog on this one. And I leaned towards blaming Russia when it happened. But... More than a few western intelligence agencies have investigated this, and not a single one has come out with an accusation. That's suspicious. The Biden administration unsanctioned the pipeline as soon as they took office, only to watch Russia march into Ukraine. That's embarrassing, especially when they then tried to "get tough" on Russia only to watch Europe keep buying energy from them. That's suspicious. The pipelines were blown up when everyone was worried about Europe going into a cold winter and having to resort to begging Russia for energy. So Russia... Blows up their leverage when they could just turn it off (and back on) at will? That's suspicious. Now if the "America didn't do it" crowd was blaming China, where there is a much clearer motive to force Russia to sell cheaply to them while also putting Europe in an energy bind, well that's a lot more plausible to me than Russia doing it. But at this point, you should always ask "why?" There are plenty of pretty obvious "why's" for blaming the US, as well as European allies that are worried Germany will once again sell out the West to get cheap Russian energy. And like I said, China could make sense too. But I'm not hearing a whole lot of "why's" for Russia, just that they're evil and crazy, which I believe, but so evil and crazy they are now slitting their own throats to... empower the American energy export industry? What is the Russian motivation for this that doesn't play right into the American goals of weakening Russia?

My concern is that we're going to do it anyways, and the price will not scale linearly with time. I'd love to see us move the massive manufacturing we put in Asia over the past 30 years into South and Central America. How on earth we thought it was a better idea to enrich economies on the other side of the planet, instead of the people who surround us, is one of the many mysteries of Washington DC. But we have to do it in a way that accepts they will eventually take over the manufacturing and associated businesses as their own, assuming we succeed in developing them. Countries can't progress as vassal states.